Cadbury’s Adopt A Cow-Picowso Event With Rose Blake

On Sunday (23rd July), myself and the children took a trip into London, to the Barbican Centre, to not only meet Buttons, but to also take part in a Cadbury’s life drawing class with renowned artist Rose Blake!

Here’s a little mini vlog of our day!

I’ve not been into London with both children on my own before, but they were absolutely awesome, and full of excitement about meeting Buttons (and eating chocolate buttons),

We arrived at the Barbican Centre, and were taken to a waiting area where the children had fun having me take their photos with promotional pictures from Cadburys!

While waiting, they could hear Buttons “waking up” and the excitement level was raised when they heard ‘mooing’!

Buttons the cow

Buttons, as previously mentioned, is an 8ft animatronic cow, created to mark the “Cadbury Dairy Milk Buttons – Adopt a Cow Campaign”.
The idea came in response to research, which revealed that city children are a bit confused when it comes to cows, and what they look like. One in 10 believe that a cow is the size of a double decker bus, whilst over 10 per cent think that they’re as small as cats. Cadbury, therefore gave city children the chance to get up close and personal with Buttons, to find out what cows actually look like.

Buttons is controlled through a mixture of robotics and two highly skilled puppeteers inside a realistic construction of the body of a cow. Both of my children were absolutely convinced there were people inside the cow (I quickly realised they were tapping into their panto memories).
There were also a team of 20 prop specialists involved in creating Buttons, which took over 500 hours to create. Ensuring that it was as authentic as possible, the highly skilled performers studied the moo-vements (I’d love to take this as my own pun, but it’s totally Cadbury’s brain child) of real cows for over 300 hours to capture the true likeness for this one-of-a-kind build.

Rose Blake

During our encounter with Buttons, the children (and adults if they wished to take part), were given the opportunity to draw a cow. Booklets with helpful tips were given to the participants (and packs of Dairy Milk chocolate buttons), and the absolutely awesome Rose Blake, was on hand to give her opinions on the mini masterpieces.
My two absolutely loved going with Rose over to Buttons, where she asked if the children’s drawings were good, resulting in a resounding nod from the animatronic cow, and pure glee from the children at this massive compliment!

They both received goody bags (and a balloon), and loved wearing their masks and happily dragged their balloons the whole way home (which was super fun on the tube and train!)

Adopt a cow

So the whole point of this event was to raise awareness of an initiative being run by Cadbury’s in which you can adopt a cow (a real life one, not an animatronic one) via an on-pack promotion.
This promotion is also giving 20 lucky families the chance to win an overnight trip to meet their cow at its farm!
These special promotion packs can be found in stores now with the competition closing on 31stAugust 2017. For more information about the Adopt a Cow campaign go to https://adoptacow.cadbury.co.uk/.